“Time passes on, and we perceive it not” (Purg. IV. 9) I. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEMATICS OF TIME: CHRONOS
AND KAIROS
Giovanni Papini wrote in Treaties about Mankind that “humans, a poet once said, are composed of two elements: time and eternity. Years slip away swiftly for those who live for time; but those who live for eternity will arrive till the consum-mation of their days, like Mosé.”1 O’Connell Baur in his Dante’s Hermeneutics of Salvation also uses the pair of binary oppositions “the temporal” and “the eternal”.
Similar distinctions are made by several other writers, poets, or philosophers.
On the one side, humans need chronological time to complete tasks, organize their everyday life, and develop themselves from every point of view. On the other side, however, there is another type of time, “the right time”, which is not short or long, which does not have a measure. Its description often appears in sacred or literary pieces. It happens in one instant but contains eternity. Chronos and Kairos, time and eternity, human and divine. Theologically speaking we can say that while in the dimension of Chronos causality (or karma) rules, in the world of Kairos finality (or akarma) does.
Chronos is the normal, ordinary time, as we usually perceive it in our every-day life: the time measured by metronomes, clocks, watches, and other measur-ing instruments.
Kairos is a quite different kind. Having reviewed the relevant literature, final-ly – mainfinal-ly based on the APA Dictionary of Psychology and the Psychology Dictionary Professional Reference – the following working definitions have been accepted:
Kairos is an experience of a timeless moment of heightened awareness at which a per-son’s typical knowledge of time fades away and one feels a sense of holistic involve-ment with another individual or thing or with the universe as a whole.2
1 Papini 1977. 448.
2 Cf. https://dictionary.apa.org/kairos.
Kairos is also known as the state of mystic union (otherwise known as the cosmic identi-fication or oceanic feeling), which is a feeling of spiritual identiidenti-fication with nature and the whole universe.3
The distinction between the Chronos and Kairos time was produced by the ancient Western culture, by the antique Greeks. Concerning the time, the an-cient East had also produced something partly similar: by the teaching of the ancient Indian yoga philosophy, the spiritual development has seven distinct stages (chakras) of which the first four relate to the normal time (equivalent to Chronos) experienced every day by ordinary people (see Figure 2 later). At the very high spiritual level of the fifth chakra and above, however, there is a kind of timelessness (equivalent to Kairos).
The average person stays at a medium or even a bit lower spiritual level, lives according to Chronos, his life is lead by karma and he is located approximately at the level of the fourth chakra, the so-called Anahata. Psychologically and spi ritu-ally more advanced and matured individuals although, who have transcended the limits of their ego and have stepped out of the circle of causality, and got rid of (chronological) time, may enter a realm that already belongs to the higher chakras. Eastern tradition marks the cessation of chronological time from the fifth chakra. Papini describes the timelessness of these stages as follows:
Space, for these dreamers, is reduced to a single point and time to eternity. (Papini 1977. 424.)
Eternity is neither short nor long: a moment that has no present because it no longer knows the earthly schedule of time for past and future. Eternity is, like God. (Ibid.
448.)
When in the Bible God says “I am who I am” (Ex. 3:14) it is the final statement of self-existence, it indicates immediate presence. In Papini’s vision Eternity’s, just like God’s existence is not upon any spacious or temporal circumstances.
Eternity is beyond human time, beyond Chronos. In the original, Greek ver-sion of the Bible, the New Testament contains the word Kairos 86 times, while Chronos is mentioned 54 times. This fact does not have to surprise us, since it contains countless descriptions of transpersonal experiences in which the indi-vidual exceeds human time and enters divine time. Vacchelli, saying that “We, moderns, have already lost this radical relationality”4 refers to this duality of time which is manifested also in the fact, that in modern languages (at least in our case, in Italian, Hungarian, and English) there is no linguistic distinction between the two temporal concepts (we have only “tempo”, “idő” and “time”).
3 Cf. https://psychologydictionary.org/kairos.
4 Vacchelli 2018. 28.
So, people of the modern Western world are almost exclusively inheritors of chronological time, and we have lost an important part of ourselves by ignoring this distinction.We have to search hard to awake our “eternity part” since our
“time part” dominates everything around us. It is no accident that – among oth-ers – Walt Whitman raises the question in his famous Song of myself: “The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity measures?” (44), then he says:
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing. (23)
In the Kairos-ruled realm of existence, which also Dante will enter, the binary oppositions disappear: the soul is neither strong nor weak, nor is time short or long anymore, it no longer has a measure. Dante also gets to experience the dissolution of oppositions at the peak of his spiritual journey, as Papini writes in Dante vivo:
Dante is outside the fixed categories, above incidental divisions, beyond the unyield-ing yea and nay (Papini 1935. 28.)
in Poesia in prosa:
I am with me. I am dissolved, far from and outside the system. I do not belong to your circle. (Papini 1932. 222.)
or in Mostra personale:
Eternity is not, as many think, an avalanche of days, the succession of centuries, the sum of thousand years, but an infinite and perennial Present. Nothing is more similar to eternity than one moment of ecstasy. (Papini 1941. 128.)
Sándor Weöres calls that one minute there, that Kairos “eternal moment”:
A moment leaning out of time arrives here and there,
guards what time squanders keeps the treasure tight in its grasp–
eternity itself, held
between the future and the past.
As a bather’s thigh is brushed by skimming fish– so there are times when God is in you, and you know:
half-remembered now and later, like a dream.
And with a taste of eternity this side of the tomb.
(Weöres 1975)
In this eternal moment, it is the soul, the spirit that – with its omnipresence and eternal stability – rules time and space without their human divisions: “the spirit is above these human distinctions, for him, everything is the same, he justifies everything” (Assagioli 1988e. 134).
II. PSYCHOSYNTHESIS IN A NUTSHELL AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE COMEDY
Psychosynthesis was established by Roberto Assagioli, who accepted, extended, and later further developed the analytic psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. About psychosynthesis in general, in English, the interested reader can refer to the following basic publications: 567. The main ideas of psychosynthesis can best be summarised shortly by the so-called “egg diagram” below (Figure 1).
5 Assagioli 1971.
6 Assagioli 2000/2008/2012.
7 Assagioli 2010.
Figure 1.
Assagioli’s model of the structure of the human psyche8
The “I” is the centre of the Field of Consciousness, surrounded by the personal unconscious. The personal unconscious is subdivided into the lower unconscious (el-ementary psychological activities, drives, primitive urges, phobias, etc.), middle unconscious (ordinary mental and imaginative activities), and higher unconscious or superconscious (higher intuitions and inspirations) regions.
The Self (also known as Transpersonal Self, or Higher Self), represented as a star at the top of the diagram. The Self, mostly as defined by Jung, is dual: it is both personal and transpersonal (universal). Assagioli declared that the Self, the real subject of all transpersonal experiences, is a permanent centre which is not necessarily religious or dogmatic:
8 Assagioli 2000/2008/2012. 17.
Figure 1.
Assagioli’smodel of the structure of the human psyche8
The “I” is the centre of the Field of Consciousness, surrounded by the personal unconscious.
The personal unconscious is subdivided into the lower unconscious (elementary psychological activities, drives, primitive urges, phobias, etc.), middle unconscious (ordinary mental and imaginative activities), and higher unconscious or superconscious (higher intuitions and inspirations) regions.
The Self (also known as Transpersonal Self, or Higher Self), represented as a star at the top of the diagram. The Self, mostly as defined by Jung, is dual: it is both personal and transpersonal (universal). Assagioli declared that the Self, the real subject of all transpersonal experiences, is a permanent centre which is not necessarily religious or dogmatic:
the Self exists in a sphere of reality different from that of the flow of psychic phenomena and from sensory imputs of organic life, and cannot be influenced by these, while its influence can profoundly modify our psychophysical conditions.(Assagioli 1988i. 25.)
8 Assagioli 2000/2008/2012. 17.
the Self exists in a sphere of reality different from that of the flow of psychic phe-nomena and from sensory imputs of organic life, and cannot be influenced by these, while its influence can profoundly modify our psychophysical conditions. (Assagioli 1988i. 25.)
All the personal unconscious contents are interfacing with the Collective Uncon-scious via the dotted borderline of the “egg”, also in the sense as Jung used this term.
According to Assagioli “it is a harmful illusion – that can easily sham us – that we are indivisible, immutable, and consistent beings.” (Roberto 1952) On the contrary, within the human psyche, there are so-called subpersonalities of differ-ent levels and kinds, which are partly autonomous differ-entities existing in continu-ous interactions and fighting with each other. Subpersonalities are based in the personal unconscious and are agglomerates of different attitudes, drives, habit patterns, characteristics, and act as false selves.
As Assagioli puts it:
Psychosynthesis, both personal and transpersonal, is a process of growth based on the harmonious integration of all aspects of the personality around the self, the center of awareness and will. Psychosynthesis sees man as tending naturally toward harmony within himself and with the outer world. (Assagioli 2010. Preface.)
The personal psychosynthesis (horizontal dimension) includes the development and harmonizing of all human functions and potentialities at all levels of the lower and middle unconscious.
The transpersonal psychosynthesis (vertical dimension), however, includes the development and harmonizing of all human functions and potentialities at the levels of the higher unconscious (superconscious). During this process of the inner ascent, the area of consciousness comes to include the content of the su-perconscious and is approaching more and more closely to the Self. It consists in raising the conscious “I” to higher levels towards the Self, and with it also the whole area of consciousness. This is what Assagioli called “psychological mountain-climbing”:
Two different, and in a certain sense opposite, ways of exploring the superconscious offer themselves. The more usual is the one that may be described as descending. It consists of the inflow, the irruption of higher elements into the field of conscious-ness. […] These inflows manifest themselves in the form of intuitions, inspirations, creations of genius, and impulses to humanitarian and heroic action. […] The other type of relationship and contact which we can establish with the superconscious is the ascendant. It consists of raising the conscious “I” to higher levels, and with it the area
of consciousness, to the point where a zone is penetrated whose location above the ordinary level of our consciousness normally prevents our knowledge of its existence.
(Assagioli 1988b. 28.) Jung wrote:
We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise around a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct. Or perhaps we could put it the other way around and say that the centre – itself virtually unknowable – acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice.
(Jung 1974. 217.)
The “magnet metaphor” – and with a bit more stressful feeling the other, so-called “spider metaphor” also – are quite apposite for many cases of ascending transpersonal psychosynthesis.
Assagioli asserted that the Comedy provides “a wonderful picture of a com-plete psychosynthesis”9 to its readers. He goes on as follows:
The first part, the Pilgrimage through Hell – indicates the analytical exploration of the Lower Unconscious. The second part – the Ascent of the Mountain of Purga-tory – indicates the process of moral purification and gradual rising of the level of consciousness through the use of active techniques. The third part – the visit to Para-dise or Heaven – depicts in an unsurpassed way the various stages of superconscious realizations, up to the final version of the Universal Spirit, of God Himself, in which Love and Will are fused. (Assagioli 1973b. 174.)
The “wonderful picture” of this inner journey will be shown in the following in some details after an excellent article by Lombard and den Biesen.10 Parts of this article of these authors are often cited in the rest of this section. Further deeper analyses on this topic can be found in two other, equally excellent, articles by the same authors.1112
The Comedy13 starts with:
9 Assagioli 1973b. 174. In English Assagioli 2000. 186.
10 Lombard – den Biesen 2014. 5–11.
11 Lombard – den Biesen 2015a. 15–20.
12 Lombard – den Biesen 2015b. 15–21.
13 This and the following cited pieces are from the translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Available also online: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/
divine-comedy.pdf (23/03/2021)
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
(Inf. I. 1–3.)
Dante, the pilgrim, states he is “midway upon the journey of our life.”1415 The explicit use of the word “our” – and not “my” – here, as Lombard and den Biesen put it,16 indicates that this is a universal journey that all of us have to take once, or at least should take.
This universal journey, however, is also always personal, as expressed by the singular in the second line of the poem: “I found myself within a forest dark”
(Inf. I. 2) (again, after Lombard and den Biesen17).
Dante then confesses that “the straightforward pathway had been lost” (Inf.
I. 3), therefore he has to take a longer one. For Assagioli it means that Dante has to “experience a profound self-analysis”.18 As Lombard and den Biesen19 asserts, from a psychosynthesis perspective, based on Figure 1., it follows that
– the first line of the poem represents the collective unconscious journey, – the second line represents the “I”, the Field of Consciousness,
– and the third line represents points to the “I”-Self-connection that had been lost (indicated as a dotted vertical line connecting the “I” with the Self).
14 The term “midway of life” can be interpreted as corresponding to the “midlife crisis”
concept coined by Jung. During the first half of our life we receive our education, choose our careers, begin a family, build up a new existence, etc., and, in the meantime, we develop a strong ego (Ego-Self Separation). Doing so, we step-by-step lose connection with the rest of our psyche. Therefore, we usually reach our midlife feeling that our things are going wrong.
At midlife we may experience alarm messages from the psyche in order to (re)establish the unity of the psyche. (After: http://jungian.ca/mid-life-jungian-analysis/, (20/03/2021).
15 Assagioli’s interpretation of the selva oscura explicitly concerns to spiritual awakening:
“The wilderness represents not only, as commentators generally say, the vicious life of the ordinary man, but also and above all, the special state of unease, of acute suffering, of inner darkness, which usually precede the awakening of the soul. To this state corresponds, much more than to the life of ordinary man, what Dante says about the forest; that is, only the memory of it filled him with fear. [...] In fact, the discovery of the hill illuminated by the sun, and the elevation of the gaze clearly indicate the decisive moment of the awakening of the soul. Then fear subsides in the lake of the heart and, after a little rest, he begins to climb the slopes of the hill. This clearly symbolizes the phase following the awakening.” (Assagioli 1988e. 131.)
And Vacchelli: “Realizing is essential. That’s all. But it is also only the beginning of seeing, of awakening.” (Vacchelli 2018. 34.)
16 Lombard – den Biesen 2014. 6.
17 Ibid.
18 Assagioli 1973b. 174.
19 Ibid.
Vacchelli puts it as follows:
The three canticles are also three states of conscience: the separative and violent, infernal one; that of transformation, purgatorial; and the paradisian one, of integration.
They are not waiting for us later, but they are here now. (Vacchelli 2018. 79.)
Since for Dante, “the straightforward pathway” – which is the direct, shortest path to the Self – had been lost, his life’s journey from the “I” has to be re-es-tablished towards the Self. Dante discovers that he is far from having a direct connection to the Self. Instead, he is standing in a “selva oscura”, (“forest dark”) helplessly and frightened. In reality, Dante is terrified by his own shadow,20 his unexplored unconscious. Assagioli believes that the selva oscura represents “that acute suffering and inner darkness which usually precedes the awakening of the soul.”21And really, there comes a touch of the awakening of the soul: he got to a mountain representing the Self.22
But after I had reached a mountain’s foot, At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart, Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders, Vested already with that planet’s rays Which leadeth others right by every road.
(Inf. I. 13–18.)
The border between the wild woody valley and the high mountain appears as a numinous transitional threshold. When he looks up to the shining top, the de-cisive moment arrives: his soul is awakened, he – although imperfectly and for moments only – enters Kairos-time. He then desires to receive more of this light and immediately begins to climb towards it. He, however, cannot approach the light straightforward, because his way is blocked by three wild beasts (a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf) and thus he is forced to give up his quick ascent up the mountain. These three beasts are symbolic manifestations of lower-level sub-personalities over whom Dante has yet to gain conscious awareness and control.
After experiencing the light, Dante is forced back to his dark wood, but now he is suffering so acutely that he cries out for help. And the help suddenly comes
20 Shadow meant (also) in the Jungian sense.
21 Assagioli 1993. 156.
22 In 1907 Assagioli, at the age of 19, wrote a story full of metaphors on spiritual research, Fantasia in Re interiore. It was published in the Leonardo of Papini and its most important symbol is a high mountain lit by the sun. http://www.psicosintesi.it/sites/default/files/rivis-ta_1991_04_robertoassagiolifantasiainreinteriore.pdf (22/03/2021).
in the shape of Virgil, the great Roman poet. In psychosynthesis terms, Virgil – himself also a subpersonality of Dante, but of a higher level – acts as the ideal guide, teaching Dante to be in relationship with his authentic “I”. As Lombard and den Biesen formulated, “Virgil empathically mirrors Dante, offering him tools and insights for achieving discernment.”23 Vacchelli, although not using psychosynthetical terms, stresses the same interpretation of the archetypical fig-ure of the “old sage”: “the outer guide is also an inner guide. Virgil is not only
in the shape of Virgil, the great Roman poet. In psychosynthesis terms, Virgil – himself also a subpersonality of Dante, but of a higher level – acts as the ideal guide, teaching Dante to be in relationship with his authentic “I”. As Lombard and den Biesen formulated, “Virgil empathically mirrors Dante, offering him tools and insights for achieving discernment.”23 Vacchelli, although not using psychosynthetical terms, stresses the same interpretation of the archetypical fig-ure of the “old sage”: “the outer guide is also an inner guide. Virgil is not only